I won't worry to much about this. Everything is under control. Don't believe me? If it wasn't the CFO and other Qantas executives would be focused only on QF issues. But they seem to have plently of spare time.....
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Leighton announced yesterday that Qantas chief financial officer, Peter Gregg, would become a director. He replaces Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon, who resigned from the Leighton board six weeks ago to become a director of PBL where executive chairman, James Packer, is a director of Qantas.
Talk about cosy cross-directorships. This Sydney shuffling is a bit like Melbourne in the bad old days, although it might indicate that Gregg is winning the battle with executive general manager John Borghetti to succeed Dixon when he eventually retires.
Surely Gregg should be too busy to have an outside directorship. It's one thing for a CEO to pick up a board seat as he heads towards retirement – Ted Kunkel at Billabong and Roger Corbett at Fairfax are two examples – but quite another to start landing them before even making it into the top job.
For some strange reason Qantas has been a pioneer of this trend, perhaps reflecting the desires of chairman Margaret Jackson, Australia's board hopper par excellence.
Jackson bailed from her two most disastrous boards, BHP and Pacific Dunlop, on 28 April 2000, the same day she was anointed as Gary Pemberton successor in the chair at Qantas. All this stuff about being too busy looked rather odd when she joined the Gold Coast-based Billabong board ten weeks later – far removed from the painful memories of chairing the audit committees at BHP and PacDun as billions were written off.
Amongst brief stints at John Fairfax and Southcorp, Jackson has also been on the ANZ board continuously for 12 years. Was it Jacko's influence on the ANZ board that saw then Qantas finance director Garry Twomey take up a board seat with the bank in 1999? Twomey was subsequently passed over for Geoff Dixon and defected to Air New Zealand which ended up costing ANZ plenty when Ansett collapsed and caused embarrassment all round. Finance directors have been rare beasts on other boards since all this happened.
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See nothing to worry about. Our executicves are so competent!!!!!!